Eventually the bishop reduced the city to subjection. He had its consuls hung in chains, and put to death all the butchers on whom he could lay his hands. The old town, built about a volcanic dyke, was ill provided with water. The wells tapped no springs, and were filled with surface-water only, and the soil was impregnated with sewage soaking down from every street and yard and lane through the joints in the rock. As a natural result typhoid fever—or the Pestilence, as the people called it—broke out, and became endemic. Frantic at this, the citizens looked about for a cause, and looked in the wrong direction. It did not occur to them that they poisoned their own wells. They assumed that the sickness was due to a league among the lepers, jealous of the health and happiness of sound men, and that they insidiously poured poison into the pits. In 1321, after a great outbreak of the plague, the citizens complained to the bishop, Durand de S. Pourcain. Perhaps he shared their conviction, perhaps he sought only to gratify the people. He swept together all the lepers in the county and burned them alive. Le Puy saw the formation of a remarkable confederacy that promised at first to achieve the liberation of the country from the scourge of the routiers. These bands of lawless men, under captains of their own selection, overran the country, levying blackmail, and pretending that they were in the service of the English King; or, if it suited them better, in that of the King of France. They passed from one allegiance to the other indifferently. Actually they served neither one side nor the other, but themselves. The merchants were robbed, the farmers despoiled, towns plundered. Existence became intolerable. Castles were erected on the top of rocks accessible only by a goat-path, or by steps cut in the stone, and there nests were built by the robbers for themselves. In these strongholds the captains and their companies lived riotously with bold women, sometimes nuns, whom they had carried off. The routiers held churches in special aversion, and plundered them without scruple. At their orgies they drank out of chalices, and vested their harlots in the silks and velvets of ecclesiastical wardrobes.